DOCSLIB.ORG

The Ultimate Precondition (Laughing At

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Ultimate Precondition (Laughing At The Ultimate Precondition (Laughing at It) / Diedrich Diederichsen Tony Conrad’s contribution to the arts of the than advancing like a slowly widening river, twentieth and twenty-first centuries does they cut through the density of the decades, not consist of many elaborate, room-filling, ages, and periods like bundles of rays and time-consuming works that require a great generate epiphanies. They draw themselves in deal of reception time, storage space, or even and are thin, like projectiles; they are very close prior knowledge. And yet they are so funda- to being completely immaterial, and yet they mental that they generate more thought time are massively preoccupied with bodies, their than the work of artists who are demanding weight, and the conditions in which they live. in the former sense. Although they relate to Perhaps in part because they are so swift and artistic formats, genres, and tools—music, film, lean, Branden W. Joseph has organized his nar- painting, installation, musical instruments, rative of Conrad’s work3 around the Deleuzian projectors, light, amplification, etc.—his works notion of the “minor” artist. Conrad did not were rarely curated, administered, interpreted, produce his pieces from a position of power or stored by established institutions in almost and authority, from the pedestal of the work. any period of his life. But his anarchism was not, as is so often the By thought time I do not mean merely the case with anarchists, another word for a lack of length of time some pieces take: consider, for concentration; it found its artistic equivalent in example, the Yellow Movies, 1972–73 (figs. a fundamental questioning, a critique of art in 56–59). For each of these works, Conrad out- the most fundamental sense of the term. lined a movie screen with black brushstrokes Artistic practice is work that reconstructs on a large sheet of paper and then filled it human activity starting from its basic precon- in with cheap paint, the gradual yellowing ditions. One could, for example, with Kant, of which he regarded as a film—a very long view these basic conditions—the a prioris—as one, of course. What is telling here is that the space and time; with Lessing, the imperatives point is not to watch the yellowing process but addressed to the artists in this direction have rather to think it—but to do so on the basis of already been developed. It is no coincidence the fact that it is actually happening. Nor do I that in the decades preceding Conrad’s early simply have in mind the very long drones that activities in the United States, a “Newer he played in the early 1960s with the Theatre Laocoön” was envisioned,4 whose author, of Eternal Music, which he preferred to call Clement Greenberg, attempted to reformulate the Dream Syndicate—hardly anyone actually for modernism the old order that Lessing had heard them. We know more or less how they established in the eighteenth century by dif- may have sounded, but above all we think ferentiating between the spatial and temporal them; we think their length.1 But thought time arts.5 This reformulation ultimately gave rise refers not just to the time in which we think to the quintessential and now all-too-familiar but also to the thinking of time. Nor would that modernist demand for medium specificity, mean simply, in the case of Conrad, the notion which in essence was already expressed by of an endless aesthetic experience—endless Lessing, and which calls for artworks to do because it is always there to be sampled afresh everything they can transparently do with and and reflected on—but also the concrete idea say about their medium—but to avoid perform- of the surpassing of all lived experience by ing magic or creating illusions. permanent (technical) recordings. In a video Yet in the blind spot of this modernism, two that Conrad wished to have released only after new, fundamental, and closely related condi- his death, he talks about the idea of speaking tions of the arts have emerged. For these to be from beyond the grave with an audience of the elevated to the status of a prioris as well, the as yet unborn.2 concept would have to be expanded some- But we do not think about the durations and what. If the a priori is classically a precondition surpassings of the experienceable the same for thinking and imagining anything at all that way we do exciting, mysterious, and inscru- is capable of giving rise to a valid judgment, we table formulas and symbols. We think them, can also speak, with Michel Foucault, of a “his- effectively, with our senses; they exercise an torical a priori” that describes the “condition[s] imagination harnessed to the senses. Yet they of reality” of statements.6 With this concept, the also brush up against what Kant called the political and social preconditions are so closely mathematical sublime, that is, the surpassing linked to the technical and medial ones that of the imagination within precise mathematical technological developments do not just consti- categories—but more on that later. tute conditions secondarily, when implemented No, these ideas have not gathered dust in as part of the production process. In my view, museum storerooms, nor have they motivated however—and this is especially true of the the many dissertations that will take up space arts—this idea implies a second important pre- and gather dust in turn. They are nimble ideas condition, at least for all the arts that work with and at the same time much too basic to spread recording technologies, and only then becomes Fig. 19. Conrad in a classroom, date unknown. 38 39 out and take up large amounts of space. Rather fully operative. For in these arts, the reference to reality is no longer primarily diegetic and projects themselves, which do not adhere to aggressive, very physical, and very male artist period in particular, to which I referred at the symbolic (temporal: a succession of conven- any style or genre or even to what the dis- versus patient material. Conrad also conducted beginning of this essay. The notion that when tional signs) or mimetic and iconic (a resem- course of the art world today would call a posi- aggressive assaults like these on the physical light falls on celluloid or photographic paper, blance deployed in space or on a surface) but tion—from the mathematician and philosopher film, except that in his case they were much when stampers are cut, and when grooves punctual and indexical. The twentieth century Henry Flynt to the founder of queer cinema and more complex.8 The point of applying this rep- are pressed into lumps of vinyl, it constitutes is distinguished by direct transmission from theater, Jack Smith, from Mike Kelley to Tony ertoire of attitudes and gestures to film, which a brute, undirected influencing of matter by reality, recorded and initially uninterpreted Oursler, John Cale, Marian Zazeela, La Monte wasn’t normally exposed to such hands-on, other matter, and that the appearance of legible impressions caused by living persons. These Young, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, and Uwe direct interventions (which were not unlike the semantics and its units, such as meaning, con- sensations caused by photographs, films, and Nettelbeck/Faust. And there are many others later scratching of records in hip-hop) was to tent, images, or chords, is just a special case sound recordings are no longer subject in the as well. Conrad often talked about how in early align the new medium with the old, so that the of that phenomenon, represents an important same degree to artistic influence and deter- 1960s Manhattan, just a few blocks apart, one critical, anti-illusionist gesture did not need to starting point for Conrad. For him, the vast, mination by a purposeful artistic project that could find the completely independent and change much. entropic waters of dull materiality in which the approaches and approximates the external sur- original planets, even universes, of Jack Smith However, Conrad soon began to take a fun- fragile dinghy of sense cognition is bobbing face of the world as mimesis. Since the advent and La Monte Young, and how despite a few damentally different approach. For example, by are a meaning, an object of fascination—but of photography and phonography, there has personal encounters and discussions they were cooking and seasoning film and finally by pick- one that can no longer be painted or evoked in always been a snapshot at the heart of every able to evolve independently of each other in ling it like cucumbers or gherkins, he not only literary language like the experience of natural project; the punctum governs a central part all of their radicalism. parodied the simple, para-iconoclastic gesture beauty or the sublime in classical art, with its of every act of reception, and with it, magic: But Conrad went a step further than his of many experimental filmmakers, which in human-piloted, pre-mechanical, and pre-techni- the radical and instantaneous conjuring up of many collaborators. He did not remain wedded any event did not bear frequent repeating. He cal procedures of writing and painting. an absent person, often one who has already to just one of these radical worlds but spent also exposed it to a different practice that was In The Flicker, 1966, or in the drones that died, within a present order—usually that of the time in all of them, bringing each of them to a frugal and domestic rather than artistic and Conrad repeatedly performed and rethought, image, music, or the narrative arts.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Temporal Disunity and Structural Unity in the Music of John Coltrane 1965-67
    Listening in Double Time: Temporal Disunity and Structural Unity in the Music of John Coltrane 1965-67 Marc Howard Medwin A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Music. Chapel Hill 2008 Approved by: David Garcia Allen Anderson Mark Katz Philip Vandermeer Stefan Litwin ©2008 Marc Howard Medwin ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT MARC MEDWIN: Listening in Double Time: Temporal Disunity and Structural Unity in the Music of John Coltrane 1965-67 (Under the direction of David F. Garcia). The music of John Coltrane’s last group—his 1965-67 quintet—has been misrepresented, ignored and reviled by critics, scholars and fans, primarily because it is a music built on a fundamental and very audible disunity that renders a new kind of structural unity. Many of those who study Coltrane’s music have thus far attempted to approach all elements in his last works comparatively, using harmonic and melodic models as is customary regarding more conventional jazz structures. This approach is incomplete and misleading, given the music’s conceptual underpinnings. The present study is meant to provide an analytical model with which listeners and scholars might come to terms with this music’s more radical elements. I use Coltrane’s own observations concerning his final music, Jonathan Kramer’s temporal perception theory, and Evan Parker’s perspectives on atomism and laminarity in mid 1960s British improvised music to analyze and contextualize the symbiotically related temporal disunity and resultant structural unity that typify Coltrane’s 1965-67 works.
    [Show full text]
  • Drone Music from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
    Drone music From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Drone music Stylistic origins Indian classical music Experimental music[1] Minimalist music[2] 1960s experimental rock[3] Typical instruments Electronic musical instruments,guitars, string instruments, electronic postproduction equipment Mainstream popularity Low, mainly in ambient, metaland electronic music fanbases Fusion genres Drone metal (alias Drone doom) Drone music is a minimalist musical style[2] that emphasizes the use of sustained or repeated sounds, notes, or tone-clusters – called drones. It is typically characterized by lengthy audio programs with relatively slight harmonic variations throughout each piece compared to other musics. La Monte Young, one of its 1960s originators, defined it in 2000 as "the sustained tone branch of minimalism".[4] Drone music[5][6] is also known as drone-based music,[7] drone ambient[8] or ambient drone,[9] dronescape[10] or the modern alias dronology,[11] and often simply as drone. Explorers of drone music since the 1960s have included Theater of Eternal Music (aka The Dream Syndicate: La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Tony Conrad, Angus Maclise, John Cale, et al.), Charlemagne Palestine, Eliane Radigue, Philip Glass, Kraftwerk, Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Sonic Youth,Band of Susans, The Velvet Underground, Robert Fripp & Brian Eno, Steven Wilson, Phill Niblock, Michael Waller, David First, Kyle Bobby Dunn, Robert Rich, Steve Roach, Earth, Rhys Chatham, Coil, If Thousands, John Cage, Labradford, Lawrence Chandler, Stars of the Lid, Lattice,
    [Show full text]
  • Experimental
    Experimental Discussão de alguns exemplos Earle Brown ● Earle Brown (December 26, 1926 – July 2, 2002) was an American composer who established his own formal and notational systems. Brown was the creator of open form,[1] a style of musical construction that has influenced many composers since—notably the downtown New York scene of the 1980s (see John Zorn) and generations of younger composers. ● ● Among his most famous works are December 1952, an entirely graphic score, and the open form pieces Available Forms I & II, Centering, and Cross Sections and Color Fields. He was awarded a Foundation for Contemporary Arts John Cage Award (1998). Terry Riley ● Terrence Mitchell "Terry" Riley (born June 24, 1935) is an American composer and performing musician associated with the minimalist school of Western classical music, of which he was a pioneer. His work is deeply influenced by both jazz and Indian classical music, and has utilized innovative tape music techniques and delay systems. He is best known for works such as his 1964 composition In C and 1969 album A Rainbow in Curved Air, both considered landmarks of minimalist music. La Monte Young ● La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist generally recognized as the first minimalist composer.[1][2][3] His works are cited as prominent examples of post-war experimental and contemporary music, and were tied to New York's downtown music and Fluxus art scenes.[4] Young is perhaps best known for his pioneering work in Western drone music (originally referred to as "dream music"), prominently explored in the 1960s with the experimental music collective the Theatre of Eternal Music.
    [Show full text]
  • Tuning in Opposition
    TUNING IN OPPOSITION: THE THEATER OF ETERNAL MUSIC AND ALTERNATE TUNING SYSTEMS AS AVANT-GARDE PRACTICE IN THE 1960’S Charles Johnson Introduction: The practice of microtonality and just intonation has been a core practice among many of the avant-garde in American 20th century music. Just intonation, or any system of tuning in which intervals are derived from the harmonic series and can be represented by integer ratios, is thought to have been in use as early as 5000 years ago and fell out of favor during the common practice era. A conscious departure from the commonly accepted 12-tone per octave, equal temperament system of Western music, contemporary music created with alternate tunings is often regarded as dissonant or “out-of-tune,” and can be read as an act of opposition. More than a simple rejection of the dominant tradition, the practice of designing scales and tuning systems using the myriad options offered by the harmonic series suggests that there are self-deterministic alternatives to the harmonic foundations of Western art music. And in the communally practiced and improvised performance context of the 1960’s, the use of alternate tunings offers a Johnson 2 utopian path out of the aesthetic dead end modernism had reached by mid-century. By extension, the notion that the avant-garde artist can create his or her own universe of tonality and harmony implies a similar autonomy in defining political and social relationships. In the early1960’s a New York experimental music performance group that came to be known as the Dream Syndicate or the Theater of Eternal Music (TEM) began experimenting with just intonation in their sustained drone performances.
    [Show full text]
  • City Research Online
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by City Research Online City Research Online City, University of London Institutional Repository Citation: Pace, I. ORCID: 0000-0002-0047-9379 (2019). The Historiography of Minimal Music and the Challenge of Andriessen to Narratives of American Exceptionalism (1). In: Dodd, R. (Ed.), Writing to Louis Andriessen: Commentaries on life in music. (pp. 83-101). Eindhoven, the Netherlands: Lecturis. ISBN 9789462263079 This is the published version of the paper. This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/22291/ Link to published version: Copyright and reuse: City Research Online aims to make research outputs of City, University of London available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the author(s) and/or copyright holders. URLs from City Research Online may be freely distributed and linked to. City Research Online: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ [email protected] The Historiography of Minimal Music and the Challenge of Andriessen to Narratives of American Exceptionalism (1) Ian Pace Introduction Assumptions of over-arching unity amongst composers and compositions solely on the basis of common nationality/region are extremely problematic in the modern era, with great facility of travel and communications. Arguments can be made on the bases of shared cultural experiences, including language and education, but these need to be tested rather than simply assumed. Yet there is an extensive tradition in particular of histories of music from the United States which assume such music constitutes a body of work separable from other concurrent music, or at least will benefit from such isolation, because of its supposed unique properties.
    [Show full text]
  • PROBES #2 Devoted to Exploring the Complex Map of Sound Art from Different Points of View Organised in Curatorial Series
    Curatorial > PROBES With this section, RWM continues a line of programmes PROBES #2 devoted to exploring the complex map of sound art from different points of view organised in curatorial series. All the ‘normal’ music we listen to is out of tune, especially when it’s ‘in tune’. Curated by Chris Cutler, PROBES takes Marshall McLuhan’s So, should music be in harmony with the laws of physics, or adjusted to fit the conceptual contrapositions as a starting point to analyse and wishful thinking of stave notation? expose the search for a new sonic language made urgent after the collapse of tonality in the twentieth century. The series looks at the many probes and experiments that were 01. Summary launched in the last century in search of new musical resources, and a new aesthetic; for ways to make music In the late nineteenth century two facts conspired to change the face of music: adequate to a world transformed by disorientating the collapse of common practice tonality (which overturned the certainties technologies. underpinning the world of Art music), and the invention of a revolutionary new form of memory, sound recording (which redefined and greatly empowered the Curated by Chris Cutler world of popular music). A tidal wave of probes and experiments into new musical resources and new organisational practices ploughed through both disciplines, bringing parts of each onto shared terrain before rolling on to underpin a new PDF Contents: aesthetics able to follow sound and its manipulations beyond the narrow confines 01. Summary of ‘music’. This series tries analytically to trace and explain these developments, 02.
    [Show full text]
  • To Repeat Or Not to Repeat, That Is the Question1 by Kyle Gann
    To Repeat or Not to Repeat, That Is the Question1 By Kyle Gann Steve Reich In the good old 1960s, the Bohemian life was cheap in lower Manhattan, the streets were relatively safe, and artists drove cabs for a living. Steve Reich, for example. He had been experimenting with tapes of interesting voices he found, and he rigged up his cab with a tape recorder so he could tape some of his passengers. One day he recorded a young African- American man who had been beaten up in the Harlem riots of 1964. By the young man's account, the police were taking away victims and would only take those who were visibly bleeding to the hospital. This young man wasn't bleeding, so, as he said, "I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them." The inner melody of that phrase intrigued Reich. He took the tape home and made tape loops from the words "Come out to show them." He started two of the tape loops together and, because his cheap tape recorders weren't precisely the same speed, he listened to them inevitably out of phase. This gradual phasing process obscured the words and turned them into a little repeated melody in C minor. Reich taped the whole process and called the resulting piece Come Out. Describing how it felt the first time he heard two tape loops go out of phase, Reich said, "The sensation that I had in my head was that the sound moved over to my left ear, down to my left shoulder, down my left arm, down my leg, out across the floor to the left, and finally began to reverberate and shake..
    [Show full text]
  • Lost Treasures by KYLE GANN TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2000 at 4 A.M
    Lost Treasures BY KYLE GANN TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2000 AT 4 A.M. In the Theatre of Eternal Music, tones grew from other tones like branches from a tree. A drone would start, and other perfectly tuned drones—guided by the flickering of La Monte Young's reedy sopranino saxophone—would appear and sustain on Tony Conrad's violin, John Cale's viola, Marian Zazeela's voice. At first it seemed like uneventful, stoned-out hippie music, but without your noticing, amazing things happened. Consonances would build off of other consonances, and you'd find yourself in a three- or four-dimensional musical space in which two sustained pitches only a fourth of a half step apart could both make perfect sense. The drones created a kind of purely in-tune polytonality that challenged all our assumptions about what harmony is. I wasn't there; I was in elementary school when Conrad, Cale, Young, & Co. were shaking Young's loft with their heavy amplification back in the '60s. But I've heard some of the tapes, which is more than most minimalism fans have. And I know what the extent of the tragedy is that we don't get to hear this music, tied up as it is up by threats of litigation. Young claims to be the sole composer and wants recognition as such, Conrad and Cale want equal billing on the basis that the music was improvisatory and collaborative. It's not like the late Beethoven sonatas have been squirreled away from a hungry public, but it is a lost view of music's more esoteric potentials.
    [Show full text]
  • Sine Waves and Simple Acoustic Phenomena in Experimental Music - with Special Reference to the Work of La Monte Young and Alvin Lucier
    Sine Waves and Simple Acoustic Phenomena in Experimental Music - with Special Reference to the Work of La Monte Young and Alvin Lucier Peter John Blamey Doctor of Philosophy University of Western Sydney 2008 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my principal supervisor Dr Chris Fleming for his generosity, guidance, good humour and invaluable assistance in researching and writing this thesis (and also for his willingness to participate in productive digressions on just about any subject). I would also like to thank the other members of my supervisory panel - Dr Caleb Kelly and Professor Julian Knowles - for all of their encouragement and advice. Statement of Authentication The work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original except as acknowledged in the text. I hereby declare that I have not submitted this material, either in full or in part, for a degree at this or any other institution. .......................................................... (Signature) Table of Contents Abstract..................................................................................................................iii Introduction: Simple sounds, simple shapes, complex notions.............................1 Signs of sines....................................................................................................................4 Acoustics, aesthetics, and transduction........................................................................6 The acoustic and the auditory......................................................................................10
    [Show full text]
  • The Deontic Miracle – Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku August 19, 2019 by Sean Hannah
    The Deontic Miracle – Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku August 19, 2019 By Sean Hannah The fact that we can even listen to Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku would seem like a betrayal of Catherine Christer Hennix’s artistic vision. The Swedish-born majordomo fronting the Deontic Miracle demands of her music both speakers and a venue that can accommodate radical fluctuations in frequency and intensity. The space informs the quality of the music as much as the performer, she maintains. Museums, as well as her own home, are ideal locales for her performances, despite whatever physical limitations lie therein. In the case of 100 Models, these performances were recorded during an exhibition in 1976 in Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, an art museum that hosted performances of works by Hennix’s contemporaries Terry Riley and La Monte Young during the same exhibition. So, for me, the idea of listening to an album, often through headphones, recorded four decades ago on another continent feels like something of a compromise of the art. But when listening to Selections, nothing about the experience feels like a defeat. The two recordings on Models, “Music of Auspicious Clouds” and “Waves of the Blue Sea,” serve as an execution of the limitless possibilities of just intonation, a method of tuning musical instruments that, according to Hennix, best preserves the purity of chordal tone. As a mathematician in addition to a musician and philosopher, her distaste for the popular Western tuning system of equal temperament is born of a mathematical devotion to maintaining the sanctity of tonality.
    [Show full text]
  • Conference Program 2013
    4th International Conference on Music and Minimalism October 3-6, 2013 Bob Cole Conservatory of Music California State University, Long Beach Welcome 4th International Conference on Music and Minimalism October 3-6, 2013 Welcome to Left Coast Minimalism: Fourth International Conference Bob Cole Conservatory of Music on Minimalist Music co-hosted by Robert Fink/UCLA and Carolyn Bremer/Cal State Long Beach. The conference takes place at the Bob Cole Conservatory on the campus of Cal State Long Beach Thursday, October 3, at 7:00pm through Sunday, October 6 at 11:00am. REGISTRATION Registration will begin at 4:00pm on Thursday, October 3 in the Daniel Recital Hall (DRH) lobby. The Registration Table will be open Friday and Saturday 9:00am – 4:00pm. HOTEL The conference hotel is Hotel Current, 5325 East Pacific Coast Highway, Long Beach, CA 90804, Phone (562) 597- 1341, Fax (562) 597-8741, http://www.hotelcurrent.com. They provide a free shuttle to campus. You will be able to store luggage securely on campus if needed, but space is limited. HOTEL SHUTTLE Please check with the front desk. They will need to make two trips to campus, so there will be an early shuttle and late shuttle for the conference. PARKING If you plan to drive, purchase a parking pass each day you park on campus for $5 per day. There is a yellow kiosk which dispenses permits across from the conservatory entrance. FOOD AND WATER There will be coffee, tea, water, and snacks available during the day. Lunch is provided on Friday and Saturday in the DRH Lobby.
    [Show full text]
  • Section I - Overview
    EDUCATOR GUIDE Story Theme: Masterworks Subject: Terry Riley Discipline: Music SECTION I - OVERVIEW ......................................................................................................................2 SECTION II – PROFILE & CONTEXT..................................................................................................3 ARTIST PROFILE CONTEXT: THE BIG PICTURE.............................................................................................................4 SECTION III – RESOURCES .................................................................................................................6 TEXTS & PERIODICALS AUDIO RECORDINGS WEB SITES VIDEOS SECTION IV – BAY AREA FIELD TRIPS..............................................................................................9 SECTION III – VOCABULARY.......................................................................................................... 10 SECTION IV – ENGAGING WITH SPARK ...................................................................................... 12 Composer Terry Riley reflects on a long, successful career. Still image from SPARK story June 2005. SECTION I - OVERVIEW EPISODE THEME INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES Masterworks Individual and group research Individual and group exercises SUBJECT Written research materials Terry Riley Group oral discussion, review and analysis GRADE RANGES K-12, Post-Secondary EQUIPMENT NEEDED TV & VCR with SPARK story “Masterworks,” about CURRICULUM CONNECTIONS Terry Riley and Kronos Quartet Music
    [Show full text]